Building a Winning Cloud Service Portfolio for Managed Service Providers

This is a critical moment for managed service providers (MSP). According to IDC, the global small-medium business (SMB) market for public IT cloud services will grow at an annual average rate of 18 percent over the next four years. By 2020, IDC estimates the total market will be worth an astonishing $81 billion.

But new opportunity brings new questions for MSPs competing for a share of this booming market. Over the next several weeks, we will explore some of these questions from a variety of perspectives with the aim of helping MSPs succeed in this evolving, competitive landscape.

The first question we’ll consider is how to design a winning portfolio of complementary services.

Think of a portfolio as a pyramid. At the foundation is the core service that every business needs. This is the anchor on which the rest of your offerings will rest. On top of the anchor sit utilities. These are services that are optional, but which greatly extend the functionality of the anchor service. At the pinnacle of the pyramid are the value-adds – services that complete a logical bundle by meshing with the first two layers of the portfolio pyramid.

Let’s look at a hypothetical portfolio for data management and collaboration:

Anchor: email, backup and archiving.

Utilities email security, recovery options for back up, and compliance reporting for archiving.

Not only does a portfolio organized in this manner make things easier for the IT decision makers who are your customers, you also strengthen your practice. By focusing on one anchor service and the utilities and value-add services that complement it, you will:

Maximize customer revenue à customers are buying more from you

Maximize the applications used by each customer à customers are adopting more cloud services from you

Reduce churn à the more services customers use, they are less likely to switch providers

In the next blog, I will introduce a cloud service portfolio with road map recommendations based on market trends and analysis.

Stephen_Spector

I manage the HPE Helion social media and website teams promoting the enterprise cloud solutions at HPE for hybrid, public, and private clouds. I was previously at Dell promoting their Cloud solutions and was the open source community manager for OpenStack and Xen.org at Rackspace and Citrix Systems. While at Citrix Systems, I founded the Citrix Developer Network, developed global alliance and licensing programs, and even once added audio to the DOS ICA client with assembler.
Follow me at @SpectorID